All Chapters of I Left Broken and Fat, I Came Back His Boss: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Emma's POVI do not sleep.I lie in that bed doing what I have quietly mastered over the past fourteen months... existing in complete stillness while approximately nine thousand things happen loudly inside my chest.At six forty three I get up because lying there waiting for the other shoe to drop has a poor return on investment and I learned that lesson around month four.The apartment looks exactly as it usually looks every morning.... beautiful, expensive, and about as welcoming as a waiting room for people too rich to wait for anything. I put the kettle on and stand at the counter and think, not for the first time, about what it would feel like to stand in a kitchen that is actually mine.Footsteps.Liam walks in already dressed, jacket on, the version of himself he presents to the world and prefers being seen as. He goes to the coffee machine, which has his order memorized, and pours a cup, and stands at the counter with his phone face down in the specific way that means he has s

Liam's POVShe is gone by Thursday.Not just her things. Her.The apartment feels different without Emma in it and I cannot explain why in any way that would satisfy me if I try, so I do not try.I stand in the bedroom doorway and look at the cleared nightstand, the empty hooks behind the bathroom door, the space on the closet shelf where her things have been, and I tell myself this is what clarity feels like.I pour a drink.Stand at the window.The city sprawls below me, lit and indifferent, and I tell myself that the year is over and what remains is the life I am supposed to have been living.I wait for that to feel like something.Talia arrives Friday evening.She walks into the apartment and looks around with the satisfied ease of someone who has been waiting a long time for a room to become available and is finally being shown to her table, and she pours herself a glass of my wine and says, "it's quiet," in a way that means good."It is," I reply."Good quiet," she says."Yes."

Emma's POVThe lawyer's name is Gerald Fitch and he calls on a Wednesday morning three weeks after I have signed everything Liam's lawyer sends over.I am in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house in San Diego by then, which is a sentence I have not expected to be true at twenty six, but here we are, yes?The room still has the same curtains from when I am seventeen and a bookshelf full of books I have read so many times the spines have given up, and I am lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and trying to decide whether the nausea is anxiety or something else entirely, when my phone rings with a number I don't recognize.I almost don't answer."Ms. Bellamy?" the voice says. I hasn't addressed me as Mrs. Carson but Ms. Bellamy. My name, the one I have been born with that I have apparently not entirely lost even when I think I have traded it in."Yes," I reply."My name is Gerald Fitch. I'm calling on behalf of the Bellamy Estate." A pause. "I believe this call is somewhat overdue

Emma's POVParis is nothing like I expect and exactly like I need.I land on a Tuesday morning in October with two suitcases, a carry-on, a body that is doing approximately forty seven things I have not authorized, and the specific brand of terrified that masquerades as calm if you hold it right.The airport is loud and fast and completely indifferent to the fact that I am twenty six years old and newly divorced and secretly pregnant and have just moved to a country where I speak the language at a level my high school French teacher would generously describe as enthusiastic.Nobody looks at me twice.It is the most invisible I have ever felt.It is the most free I have ever felt.Those two things are the same thing, I am realizing, and that realization alone feels worth the plane ticket.I stand at the baggage carousel and watch my suitcases come around and think about the last time I was at an airport. Eight months ago, flying back from New York with Liam after a conference where I h

Emma's POVThe first contract is small.A French textile company, family owned, three generations deep, currently losing money in ways that are entirely preventable if someone who knows what they are looking at would just look at it. They find me through a mutual contact of my mother's cousin who knows someone who knows someone, which is the least glamorous origin story for a business relationship I can imagine, but here we are.I know nothing about textiles.I learn everything about textiles. I spend three weeks reading everything I can find, making calls to industry contacts who have no particular reason to talk to me but do anyway because I ask the right questions in the right order, and I sit at my secondhand kitchen table with my laptop and three different reference books and a French dictionary and the specific focused energy of a woman who has something to prove and is only just beginning to understand that the person she is proving it to is herself.I write a restructuring pl